A contemporary of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel in Spain's Second Republic, Max Aub escaped into a life of exile after General Franco seized Barcelona. His evocative, modernist masterwork, acknowledged in Spain as one of the best accounts of the Spanish Civil War, is the five-novel cycle known as The Magic Labyrinth. The protagonist of this first novel is Rafael López Serrador, whose coming of age in Barcelona introduces a cast from all walks of city life—Catalan nationalists, anarchists, Falangists, government ministers, and showgirls—and the city itself, as much a character as the others. Translated into English for the first time here, by the author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, Aub's novel is a classic of Spanish and Latin American literature.

"The novel explodes with the sights and smells of the teeming Catalan city, where Serrador falls in with a left-wing crowd while sorting through his own politics. The violence begins to sicken and corrupt Serrador, and the novel closes to one day's paroxysm of mayhem that engulfs Barcelona. The first in a six-book series, this immersive narrative, fluidly translated, is accessible and gripping."—Publishers Weekly

"Not only indispensable reading for anyone who wants to fathom the psychological origins of the Spanish Civil War, it is indisputably the most impressive work of literary art among the host of novels produced by the war."—Gerald Griffiths Brown